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Earth had warmest winter on record

The Earth just had its warmest winter on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday.

Winter is defined as the months of December, January and February in the Northern Hemisphere, and 90% of the world’s population lives in the Northern Hemisphere. Those months are summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Specifically, the Northern Hemisphere had its warmest winter on record, and the Southern Hemisphere had its fourth-warmest summer.

It’s also the warmest year-to-date on record, NOAA said. February itself was the second-warmest February on record.

Temperatures for December–February beat the previous winter record in 2007 by 0.05 degrees, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported. Global temperature records go back to 1880.

Global temperatures for December-January. Areas in red and pink were warmer-than-average, while areas in blue were cooler-than-average. Eastern North America was one of the few land areas that saw an unusually cool winter. (Photo: NOAA/NCDC)

One of the planet’s only land areas that had a cooler-than-average winter was eastern North America, which includes the eastern United States and eastern Canada.

Areas that saw record warmth those three months include the western U.S. and part of central Siberia and eastern Mongolia.

A separate global temperature measurement from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, released Tuesday, said it was the second-warmest winter on record for those three months.

Some of the warmer-than-average temperatures over the winter are because of a nascent El Niño —- a climate pattern when warm sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific influence weather around the world.

The warming effects El Niño increase the chances that this year could end up being the warmest on record — beating out the 2014 record.